The docent-led movement through the MoRE, room by room of the first and then second floor, appears traditional. However, the panel format and ability to explore without restriction creates an original HHM experience. The tour begins with a block-long walk from the Robert Mills Museum Shop to the Wilsons’ front porch, where the docent provides an introduction. There docents disclose upfront the tour’s unconventional design and the interpretation’s focus on Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War and ending in South Carolina in 1876, through the eyes of Tommy Wilson. The dual narratives of Reconstruction and the Wilson family thematically link the room exhibits, and each room has its own topic relative to Reconstruction or the Wilsons and usually both. Transition and introductory room statements establish these subthemes and direct visitors to additional information available on panels and through artifacts. Visitor engagement points with the docent, generally built around an open-ended, thematic question, continue conversations surrounding these topics.

The tour script required that docents cover three critical components for each space: transition, room, and engagement statements. Inclusion of these statements illuminated an issue with personal ownership over one’s tour and the divide between volunteer and weekend staff in control over the tour narrative. Brazier embraced the “stricter” script that limited the “freedom” to personalize her tour beyond fine-tuning based on visitor interest. She “didn’t necessarily want to put too much of me into it.” Morgan disagreed. In making the script hers, she brought in seminary history she used on her Robert Mills mansion tour and explored the themes of America’s “rapid expansion” West and across the globe and the loss of interest in Reconstruction. “We just didn’t give as a nation Reconstruction long enough to actually make Page 59 →change,” Morgan argued. The America of the Civil War era took “generations to build,” and the nation could not “change all of that, roll it back in twelve years.” Though an institutionally trusted and popular guide, Morgan waited six months to be evaluated after completing the first training in January. She spent this time producing her own interpretive methodology and presentation.³

The first half of the tour takes place on the first floor, launching from the entrance hall (room 1) where visitors become acquainted with Woodrow Wilson’s family. Panel images introduce Tommy, who sat for a portrait when he lived in Columbia, and his parents, Joseph and Janet Wilson; however, docents verbally present Tommy’s older sisters, Annie and Marion; his younger brother Josie; and the presence of domestic workers.⁴ The southeast formal parlor (room 2) orients the visitor to Reconstruction on the local, state, and, to a lesser degree, national levels. The study’s (room 3) main theme is religion.

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The Wilson family and their maternal in-laws, the Woodrows, were key figures in the southern Presbyterian Church. Reconstruction, however, also witnessed the proliferation of free Black churches. The pantry and passage (rooms 6 and 7), or butler’s pantry, open conversations between docent and visitor about domestic labor and local merchants. Dialogue often trickles into the adjoining dining room (room 8), a space that considers family life, both the Wilsons’ and that of Columbians at large. The final space, the southwest family parlor (room 9), explores the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution ending slavery, providing citizenship, and granting suffrage to Black men. Citizenship takes center stage for five minutes via a short exhibit film and discussion about the Fourteenth Amendment, segregation, and contemporary issues of citizenship.⁵

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The second half of the tour moves into the private spaces of the home in the bedrooms located on the second floor. Visitors stop first in Tommy’s bedroom (room 10), which highlights young Wilson’s passion for baseball and British politics as well as his education, a topic expanded in the northwest bedroom (room 12).⁶ Its theme, “The Promise of Reconstruction,” unveils the origins of an integrated public education system in South Carolina in 1868. The southwest bedroom (room 11) sandwiched between rooms 10 and 12, presents two aspects of the politics of Reconstruction: municipal services and the introduction of a temporary two-party system in the South. Republicans and Democrats of the era look vastly different to visitors than the parties they recognize today. The final two bedrooms (rooms 14 and 15) on the east Page 62 →side navigate the traumatic resolution to Reconstruction in South Carolina. These spaces address political terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts as well as the complex and often incorrect ways Woodrow Wilson and Reconstruction have been remembered. If time permits, visitors explore the back porch before returning to the first floor for self-guided touring of the bathing room and water closet (rooms 4 and 5). Although fixtureless, these rooms include house rehabilitation videos as well as descriptive panels about each room’s use. By opening access to these last two rooms that were private, additional spaces to the original home, the MoRE made spaces usually closed off from tours publicly available to visitors.⁷

Time and place were critical components of the new tour. Visitors purchased their tour ticket in the Robert Mills Museum Shop, Historic Columbia’s gift shop located in a reconstructed flanker of the Mills home. Shop and house both bear the name of the famous architect who designed the residence, but during Reconstruction the Presbyterian Church’s Columbia Theological Seminary occupied these buildings. The one-block journey to the MoRE commenced from this sacred space.⁸ Both the preservation and rehabilitation of the premier artifact—the Wilson home—and patriarch Joseph Wilson’s appointment to the seminary allowed the visitor to think immediately about the importance of time and place. This was a middle-class home constructed at the height of Reconstruction in Columbia and centered in a Presbyterian world.⁹ Although the South was upended through Civil War and Reconstruction, Tommy’s world retained some sense of normalcy through the ever-present Presbyterianism that rooted his childhood and bound his community together.¹⁰ From the onset of the tour, docents immersed visitors in Tommy’s Presbyterian environment. His father spent a decade at First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, before moving the family to Columbia. Once in the capital, the Wilson family built their first home, just a block from the seminary. Visitors walked in Tommy’s shoes by taking a path similar to the future president and his father.¹¹

The tour invites guests to “imagine for a moment” Columbia during Reconstruction rather than docents telling guests about the Wilsons and Reconstruction in an abstract space. Docents illuminated what HHM anarchists Franklin Vagnone and Deborah Ryan call the “social and cultural construct” of Tommy’s neighborhood during Reconstruction. This enables visitors to conjure this world and negotiate what their place within it, as well as the Wilsons’, might have been.¹² Docents pushed both visitors and the interpretive team to consider the importance of the space within this world. Weekend staff docent Jennifer Gunter asked visitors to imagine the dirt Page 63 →roads, construction, and horses and buggies as they retraced Tommy’s path in the 1870s. This was not a stretch for “realistic” people like volunteer docent Jean Morgan, who preferred immersion in the “real environment.”¹³ Pam Redfield, another volunteer docent, discovered a neighborhood anecdote and emphasized it to introduce Annie, Tommy’s sister. Annie was neighbor to her future husband, Dr. George Howe Jr., for a few months while the Wilson home was being constructed. The Wilsons rented a house (today the Campbell-Bryce House) near the seminary and across the street from the Howes. Redfield’s experience as a guide taught her that “visitors love these fun facts.” Because of her approach, the tour clarified the spatial relationships of the neighborhood and Tommy’s world, linking the seminary, the rental of the Campbell-Bryce House, and the Wilson’s new home together.¹⁴

Docents and staff wanted the tour to be forthcoming about the focus on Reconstruction through Tommy Wilson’s eyes and the tour’s unconventional design. Visitors had likely heard that the MoRE was a departure from the traditional HHM from media coverage or the synopsis they heard in the gift shop.¹⁵ When Historic Columbia revised the script in the summer of 2014, using Tommy as a lens to a time and place became the centerpiece of the MoRE’s introduction. Months of tour experience by docents solidified the precise script language needed to convey this theme: “Today we will explore the teenage years of Woodrow Wilson and his family’s experience in this city during Reconstruction. Thus, the Wilson family becomes the lens through which we see this place and time. By the end of the tour, you should have a greater understanding of the complexities of both Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson.”¹⁶

Consultant Annie Wright argued that the introduction gave visitors “a schema that new info can fit into.”¹⁷ This dual narrative grounded the tour and offered visitors the opportunity to consider how Reconstruction shaped the future president and how Wilson shaped the memory of the period. The layering of Reconstruction over Wilson moved beyond the traditional narrative of one or two people at the height of their prestige, which often silences marginalized groups occupying the home or local community. By using Tommy the teenager, not the president, as the main character, the experiences of his youth allowed visitor/docent inquiry into the Reconstruction era with its diverse cast of religious leaders, educators, politicians, and citizens.¹⁸

Most docents took great care to craft and present their explanation of the dual narrative and tour format upfront. Gunter emphasized that the MoRE is “a museum inside of a house and not a house museum.” She used that as a stepping stone to then address the construction and rehabilitation of the primary artifact, the Wilson home.¹⁹ Vagnone and Ryan, who lead an HHM anarchist movement, argue that these sites are having an “identity crisis” as to Page 64 →whether they are houses or museums.²⁰ The MoRE shows that some HHMs are both. Docent Doe wanted visitors to understand the tour’s purpose at the beginning. She told them, “We are here to talk about and interpret this time in American history, this time in Southern history, particularly this time in Columbia, seeing it through the eyes of a family who lived here in the middle of this time period, a family who happened to have a son who became a president of the United States.”²¹ These efforts by docents minimized the bait-and-switch effect on visitors, who otherwise may have felt deceived, alienated, or suspicious of the museum.²² Weekend staffer Halie Brazier stressed the focus on the president’s teenage years, the world around him, and minimal material culture within the house. She “wanted to be frank and upfront” for the majority of guests who came for Woodrow Wilson and received a lesson on Reconstruction. She informed visitors, “There are plenty of other historic houses that do that” [solely focus on Wilson].²³ As chapter 1 explains, there are in fact three HHMs enshrined to Wilson, one a little over an hour away in Augusta, Georgia.

Wilson HHMs in Augusta, Columbia, and Staunton, Virginia, speak to a specific time and place in Tommy Wilson’s development and through a southern and Presbyterian lens. However, the 2014 exhibit and tour installed in the MoRE employs these themes in order to uncover the misunderstood period of Reconstruction. In addition to the MoRE docent script narrative, an introductory panel in the entry hallway buttressed the importance of the time and place of Wilson’s move during the period of Reconstruction, when “the entire community was working out the meanings of freedom in a post-slavery society.” Completed in fall of 1871, the home was built “at the height of post–Civil War Reconstruction.” But what did this mean for Tommy? The panel encouraged visitors to walk through the house and “think about how Tommy Wilson’s experiences in Columbia may have shaped his ideas as the future 28th president of the United States.”²⁴ Some docents used the dual narrative to ignite a conversation about the rhetorical question. Volunteer Kathy Hogan, seeking conversation over assumption, asked her tour in the entry hall: “If you were fourteen years old and living in this house and in this time and place how might it have impacted you?”²⁵ For her the home was “unique in that it tells the story of a time and place,” specifically Reconstruction, a subject no other museum had been solely devoted to and that many people “want to sweep … right under the rug.” Everyone should know about the time period, because “you cannot understand civil rights, you cannot understand current African American relations with Black Lives Matter, you cannot understand any of that … if you don’t understand what preceded it.”²⁶ Docents asked visitors to think critically about how living in Page 65 →Reconstruction-era Columbia shaped Wilson, even if they struggled to answer those questions definitively for themselves.

The debate and ambiguity surrounding Reconstruction’s influence on Wilson, particularly his racial and political views, trickled into other spaces as well. This manifested itself most prominently in the final space of the tour (room 15), which is discussed in the last chapter on the difficulties that the interpretive team and docents had in addressing white supremacy during Wilson’s administration. However, a panel in the formal parlor, immediately following the entry hall, devoted to the politics of Reconstruction in Columbia and South Carolina offered an opportunity to think critically about how Wilson understood Black political power on a national and international level. Black Americans, including Republicans, voted for Wilson, a Democrat, because they believed his 1912 campaign message to support Black constituents. Wilson, however, believed segregation to be a moderate position in the South that eased racial tension. The president understood the segregationist policies of his southern cabinet members Albert Burleson, the postmaster-general, Josephus Daniels, secretary of the navy, and William McAdoo, secretary of the treasury and Wilson’s son-in-law, all of whom segregated their offices and workspaces. Segregating federal offices in Washington, DC, sent a powerful message about federal support for Jim Crow and sparked protest.²⁷ Wilson’s biographers have noted that he was no champion of ethnic nation-states or self-determination outside of Europe. However, colonized people in Africa and Asia shrewdly adopted Wilson’s Fourteen Points and League of Nations rhetoric to legitimize their claims for independence and political freedom, ushering in an international “Wilsonian moment.” These nationalists sent hundreds of documents to Wilson in Paris, petitioning him and other leaders for a hearing at treaty negotiations at Versailles and for statehood in the League of Nations. Wilson sided with the imperial allied powers of Japan, Great Britain, and France, ending the Wilsonian moment and prompting nationalists and elites to launch popular anticolonial, and often communist, campaigns across the Middle East and Asia in 1919. Asian imperialism endured, but this shift planted the seeds of its destruction. At home Black activists W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, who campaigned against federal segregation and the racist film The Birth of the Nation, adopted this same language of self-determination.²⁸

However, the MoRE, by exploring Wilson’s childhood under a biracial democracy, adds a new layer of complexity to historians’ assessments of his racial policies and philosophy of self-determination. Wilson was not naive or ignorant when it came to Black political power. As a teenager he witnessed a successful biracial state legislature and was represented by a middle-class Page 66 →Black man. The story of William Beverly Nash is featured on a panel in the first large exhibit that the guests experience (formal parlor, room 2) on early rebuilding efforts of Reconstruction and Black representation. W. B. Nash was the senator for Richland County throughout Reconstruction, helping draft the 1868 state constitution and serving until domestic terror during the election of 1876 ended his tenure. Reconstruction’s Thirteenth Amendment freed Nash, who went from enslaved to business entrepreneur during the period. Active in real estate, he owned a large farm and part of a brickyard.²⁹ Nash was a successful businessman when Wilson lived in Columbia and, more important, was his representative at a time when the future president developed a deep interest in government. Wilson knew well that Black political leadership came from economically successful representatives and produced legislative results.

When Historic Columbia centered the Wilson home as the museum’s primary artifact, it permitted an interpretation focused on a specific place and time period. Historic Columbia chose to leave the house exposed, displaying its rehabilitation rather than an overwhelming number of objects that distract from the restored faux graining, the reproduction gas-lighting system, and exposed paint layers and wallpaper. This corresponds to a twenty-first-century museum philosophy that treats the museum building as an object (and one that can be more significant than the objects housed inside). Louisiana’s Old State Capitol Museum was a precursor to the MoRE’s interpretation in that the structure became the key artifact and the exhibition included multimedia and flexible guided approaches. Both attacked their subjects first and foremost through the building. The Capitol Museum was the only museum in the world devoted exclusively to Louisiana politics, just as the MoRE was the first museum devoted to Reconstruction.³⁰

By creating a panel-driven exhibit on Reconstruction in the capital city, Historic Columbia resolved issues related to its Wilson collection. The organization possessed the home and only five original Wilson family artifacts, a fraction of the material culture needed to complete traditional HHM period-room vignettes. This strategy enabled the MoRE to weave the history of Black Americans during Reconstruction into a minor story about the teenage years of Wilson. The MoRE’s minimalist collection stands in stark contrast to the eight thousand artifacts maintained by the PWWH in Washington, DC. This includes much of his presidential collection of gifts from dignitaries and state officials as well as memorabilia. For example, Wilson and his second wife, Edith, brought with them from the White House the dip pen he used to declare war and a gold timepiece from the first Page 67 →president of Czechoslovakia. The couple also packed Pope Benedict XV’s mosaic and, from Hollywood couple and Liberty Bond promoters Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, a graphoscope that magnified small works of art, photographs, postcards, and text. Today the National Archives houses most presidential gifts, but at that time there was no policy regarding their preservation.³¹ With much of the Wilson estate donated to PWWH and his birthplace in Virginia, there was a lack of material culture available for the Columbia home. Historic Columbia’s choice to minimize material culture in the MoRE was a product of the collection, but this move away from an object-centered approach also placed the museum within a larger trend of favoring a people-centered approach to interpreting objects.³²

Museums possess a long history as repositories for objects and object-based epistemology where object meaning is generated through their systematic collection, classification, and arrangement. While giving the appearance of order, the grouping is unnatural in that it sterilizes any quirkiness about the objects and the world in which they operated. Spaces that were once intimate become staged and limit interaction. This “cult of the object” privileges comprehension of the artifact over how people lived in these environments. To reverse this and delve more deeply into the complexity of domestic spaces, sites must transcend the objects. In addition this ordering makes less sense as education replaces collecting as the primary function of museums overall.³³

Museums, especially those with large or well-known collections, will continue to center objects, but others that may be smaller or newer are reducing or eliminating objects, often in favor of interactive audio and visual components. The drawbacks are that the remaining objects have to work harder to tell the story and provide less opportunities for alternative narratives.³⁴ However, in the case of the MoRE, decluttering and choosing objects that only had a connection to the Wilson family and Reconstruction emptied the space to make room for alternative narratives. The removal of objects produced a similar effect as that of the Mikhail Bulgakov House in Kyiv, Ukraine, when it painted its nonoriginal artifacts white to make the original artifacts stand out.³⁵ Volunteer Jean Morgan found herself pleased with historic preservation’s evolution over the decades to highlight the authenticity of the space and material culture. The MoRE’s objects are “authentic to that house, to that space, to that family,” a point she emphasized on her tours. Tour and program coordinator Heather Bacon-Rogers concurred that reproductions and objects with no relationship to the house were “meaningless” in advancing the story.³⁶ The number of Wilson homes within a saturated HHM industry helped two docents explain why Historic Columbia chose a minimalist approach to objects to advance a Reconstruction narrative. Morgan blamed the limited objects on the competition between four Wilson HHMs. She believed the Columbia house was “late to the game” of acquisitions rather than restricted from items Edith Galt Wilson intended to donate to the birthplace in Staunton or National Trust for Historic Preservation with her home in Washington, DC.³⁷ However, the local American Legion Auxiliary procured four of the five objects currently on display during the museum’s early years.

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To compensate for the reduction in objects and complement the panels, Historic Columbia incorporated digital interactives in the home. The organization digitized the bird’s-eye map of Columbia drawn by Camille Drie in 1872 and placed the station in the formal parlor. It is the home’s most successful interactive, allowing visitors to navigate and explore sites and structures significant to Reconstruction, the Wilsons’ world, and Columbia. The script Page 69 →included specific instructions, demonstrations, and engagement questions because the interpretive team expected high levels of interaction. Guests continued to explore temporally and spatially Columbia and Wilson’s community by zooming in and out on locations or searching by building name or subject.³⁸

Docent oral histories clearly established that visitors were drawn to the map, physically engaging with the theme of space and time, but the level of popularity varied. Docents frequently expressed that visitors liked the map and used it to learn more about Columbia landmarks.³⁹ For Morgan the map was “a very physical representation” of Tommy’s world, the spaces he occupied and walked to at a specific moment in time before the conveniences of modern transportation.⁴⁰ Bacon-Rogers agreed that guests could “triangulate” where Tommy lived and might have gone. The twenty-first-century connection to the past allowed visitors to “pretend” they were using their “iPad at home” and exploring “something old with something new.” She speculated that all visitors, “every last one of them,” engage with the map because “everybody has come from somewhere in the city,” their hotel, their house, the zoo. They “are able to map how they got there and how different things looked.”⁴¹ Three other docents confirmed this observation, noting that guests wanted to position popular sites and places they had visited such as the State House, the University of South Carolina, or Elmwood Cemetery in relationship to the home and see the differences over time.⁴² For other docents the map became a learning tool to direct visitors to other “great places,” especially First Presbyterian Church, where Wilson’s parents are buried. Then the visitors took it upon themselves to place their modern experiences in Columbia digitally in the 1872 version or to find other interests.⁴³ Bacon-Rogers described the map as a “special” interactive tool, “one of the best” in Historic Columbia’s arsenal to bring Reconstruction into the twenty-first century.⁴⁴

Several volunteer docents, however, argued that the map was hit or miss. They questioned how much learning or engagement was taking place as visitors pressed buttons, especially children.⁴⁵ While volunteer Doe witnessed more interest in the panels than the map, Bacon-Rogers thought the panel-heavy exhibit benefited from technological breaks. The weekend manager speculated, and volunteer docent interviews confirmed, that map ambivalence was an anomaly. It stemmed from docents not demonstrating the map properly, if at all, and moving to another room, which discouraged play. Docents needed to be at ease using the tablet-like tool to help visitors feel comfortable. Bacon-Rogers adamantly declared of her tours, “When I say 100 percent of people look at that map, I mean 100 percent.”⁴⁶ Hogan agreed that demonstrating the tool to visitors was critical. Even one of the two volunteer docents who claimed that only locals showed interest in the map admitted to not spending much time with visitors and the tool. Another docent attributed lukewarm interaction to a lack of children, who are more likely to play with interactives than adults, and smaller groups, who were more attached to the docent.⁴⁷

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Page 71 →The lack of objects posed few problems for docents on MoRE tours, although it was a concern before opening. Two docents on weekend staff worried about a lack of material culture in the home. Bacon-Rogers thought visitors might complain, and some did. She led tours on the weekend at the busiest time. Laughing, she disclosed that “the no furniture, we hear a lot about.” But like volunteer Kathy Hogan, Bacon-Rogers found people appreciated that the objects the MoRE did display were “genuine articles” and family pieces chosen in a “more deliberate way.” Weekend staff docent Erin Holmes primarily feared that the absence of objects would affect her interpretation style of blending architecture and material culture, her areas of expertise as a PhD student. However, she discovered “a much stronger framework and more touchstones for the visitors to connect to when they didn’t have an object in front of them.” By blending architecture “extensively” throughout her tour with the required transition, room, and engagement statements, she easily illuminated the primary artifact.⁴⁸ Two docents never had any concerns about the scarcity of objects. One had no previous exhibit to compare the new interpretation to, unlike senior docents, who gave old material-culture-heavy tours before the 2005 closure of the home. Brazier saw a “museum not a period house” and a nontraditional tour that added to Historic Columbia’s museum repertoire. The organization’s Hampton-Preston mansion “was chock full of objects,” she argued, but people “couldn’t even get close to a vast majority of things so those aren’t necessarily effective.” She found the images and the information on the text panels “more akin to her style of learning.” ⁴⁹

No longer bound by the weight of rooms inundated with material culture, docents chose to ignore some material culture and privilege other objects to strengthen and advance their narrative. If an object seemed out of place or forced on the MoRE tour, docents bypassed it. For one docent it was the birth bed where Tommy was born in Staunton, located in the bedroom devoted to the memory of both Reconstruction and Wilson. Another docent detoured exhibit items in the formal parlor, such as the rocking chair, which seemed to be a contrived effort to fit a Wilson family object in the space.⁵⁰ While some objects could be easily skipped, two areas, the study and the bedroom detailing the end of Reconstruction, possessed social objects capable of initiating conversation or connecting strangers. The study, filled with the majority of family objects, is the most popular object-based engagement point because the personal objects are items familiar to most museumgoers: Page 72 →a family pew from the Wilson’s church and matriarch Jessie’s Bible set and quilt. The first edition copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, not a Wilson artifact, is also popular.⁵¹ Weekend staff docent Casey Lee said visitors were drawn to room 14’s red shirt, worn by a member of the paramilitary forces committed to returning power to the Democratic Party in 1876, because of its connection to the larger narrative in the house. Some visitors may have more interest in the family pieces replicated in traditional HHMs, like the bed, and ask more questions about Wilson; however, other visitors are drawn to Reconstruction and objects not normally seen in HHMs, such as an 1876 fraudulent tissue ballot or the red shirt. As explained in chapter 5, the red shirt and tissue ballot are examples of provocative social objects because of their connection to political and racial violence and election fraud.⁵²

Historic Columbia compensated for the absence of Reconstruction-era or Wilson-related material culture with a few well-selected reproductions. Docent responses were mixed. Bacon-Rogers thought the reproduction clothing in Tommy’s room was “fantastic” and afforded a “direct connection” because people could “hold them and handle them and understand the type of clothing he was wearing.”⁵³ Gunter disagreed, noting that, while cute and hands-on, the clothing distracted from bigger concepts that children are fully capable of grasping if not overshadowed by dress-up and picture taking. This philosophy extended to the reproduction stereoscopes in the education bedroom. The question for Gunter was “Why are we having fun?” The lasting legacy of public education created during Reconstruction and the brief integration of the University of South Carolina were far more important themes set up to be discussed in this space. Thus she waited for guests to finish looking at images before she spoke about these critical topics.⁵⁴

Several docents expressed that the MoRE changed the way they thought about HHMs needing objects and period rooms. Four guides favored interpretations that deemphasized objects to advance a narrative of historical importance rather than one of a particular family or a period furniture lesson. Three docents specifically named the MoRE as their favorite of the four houses administered by Historic Columbia because of its Reconstruction theme and move away from furniture. Volunteer Cyndy Storm chose to specialize in the MoRE because she preferred talking about the home within the context of Reconstruction in Columbia over “telling a family story” and pointing out “old furniture.” What volunteer John Clark liked most about the house was its lack of objects, not “the same old same old … house with all this stuff.” For Gunter, Reconstruction was far more interesting than looking at the possessions of the middle class or wealthy. The reinvention of the Wilson HHM changed expectations too. Bacon-Rogers summarized her changed philosophy: “Just a pretty house museum doesn’t do it for me anymore.”⁵⁵

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MoRE visitors arrived expecting an abundance of material culture based on their understanding of traditional HHMs and museums. However, guests are not disappointed by fewer objects. In her everyday conversations outside of volunteering, Storm warned prospective guests interested in period furniture about what they will find inside the MoRE.⁵⁶ But the majority of docents, particularly volunteers who work during the week, received no complaints from guests about the lack of objects.⁵⁷ One factor was that docents and gift shop staff told visitors upfront about the limited number of objects. When docents explained on the front porch that guests would not see rooms “crammed full of furniture that you look at from a distance,” visitors nodded in agreement or out of politeness, because they had generally been informed by the gift shop manager before purchasing tickets.⁵⁸ Weekend staff protocol required telling visitors a blanket statement that the MoRE was not a furnished, traditional house museum. Rather it was a “museum in a house, not a house museum.”⁵⁹ Visitors were thus prepared to show interest in the artifacts to which they were exposed. Of 556 respondents on the visitor survey, when asked what information they found most interesting, nearly half selected what the tour guide told them (45.5 percent). But only 3 percent of Page 75 →visitor interest separated the panels (23.38 percent) and artifacts (20.68 percent) in second and third place.⁶⁰

No amount of preparation nor well-conducted tour can persuade some visitors to abandon their preconceived notions about object-filled HHMs. Clark heard a few comments but, as a docent tapped for interpretive team meetings, knew that objections manifested themselves more often in the visitor evaluations solicited by docents at the end of the tour. Despite the positive response to artifacts on the survey, disappointment at a lack of objects was the number one criticism of the home written in the comments section. From opening through January 2015, eighteen comments, or just over 5 percent of the 337 total comments, referenced objects, furniture, or artifacts. However, 6 of those, or one third, were positive statements. Artifacts were “loved,” “captivating,” or “interesting and helpful.” One evaluator “appreciated how the home was not over crowded with ramdom [sic] artifacts.” Although 14 comments called for more objects, their absence did not distract visitors from enjoying the tour. They appreciated that original artifacts were hard to come by as well as the focus on Reconstruction. For two respondents the exhibit films played in the home helped compensate, as did the “great” guide for one visitor. Although it was “a bit spartan” or “bare” in some visitors’ eyes, four visitors wanting more material culture still called the museum “wonderfully done,” “well worth the visit,” “so fantastic,” and “overall a very enjoyable experience.”⁶¹

Docent experiences reinforced the affirmative visitor comments. A visitor might enter a museum not wanting a nontraditional HHM experience, but they often left satisfied. When visitors expressed displeasure or made comments, docents often converted them into fans of a new kind of HHM experience, or they otherwise went on to enjoy the tour.⁶² One weekend Bacon-Rogers led a group that had not been told the blanket statement. “They came to see a pretty house. Plain and simple,” she recalled. The first thing they asked was “Where is the furniture?” But by the time she entered the pantry and dining room, they began “to finally forget about the furniture, completely,” and “were fully engaged in the material.”⁶³ They ultimately “enjoyed the unconventional house tour” once they explored and understood that “the pieces that were chosen were meaningful and directly related to the family.” The experience inspired them “to want to find other such houses and museums.”⁶⁴ What Bacon-Roger’s story indicated, and another volunteer confirmed, is that visitors forget about the furniture once immersed in the tour.⁶⁵

Whether giving tours during the week to smaller audiences or to larger groups on the weekend, docents found the objects mattered less when visitors received an unexpected experience. Clark’s “general perception” was that Page 76 →visitors left the MoRE “very happy with what they’ve seen there, as enthusiastically happy” as with other tours of HHMs he gave, if not more so. Visitors got “something they did not expect,” new information. That was “what we do here … a high proportion of it is new to almost everybody who goes here.” Bacon-Rogers acknowledged that the tour would not please everyone, but “nine times out of ten we’ve given them such a different experience that they are thrilled with what we’ve done.”⁶⁶ They are transported to a different type of museum where uncomfortable topics can be teased out. She saw visitors purchase tickets for the tour expecting another furnished home. She continued: “They realize we are special. We’re covering a topic that a lot of people don’t want to talk about. That they never thought that they would come to a museum just to talk about something that was going to make them uncomfortable. But I think we’re making people uncomfortable in a way that’s making an impact.”⁶⁷

The curatorial choices made for the MoRE situated it within recent institutional shifts where collections became secondary to sites and missions that sought greater political relevancy. Like other historical museums courting diverse audiences or presenting one historical event, the MoRE’s design carved a space for the Black experience of Reconstruction. It also turned the HHM origins of preserving the lives of great men on its head by using Wilson to show the white supremacist response to freedom rather than enshrining him.⁶⁸ The MoRE’s Reconstruction narrative thrust the HHM into membership in what Steven Conn calls a “second golden age” for museums, where moral compasses, inclusive narratives, and ideas have rendered objects secondary. With a less structured tour providing physical access, particularly to objects previously forbidden, visitors felt less forced to focus on objects and were more inclined to use them to support questions and analyze the narrative.⁶⁹

The difficulty of Reconstruction as subject matter, the exhibit’s text-heavy panels, and traditional expectations of a guided tour for house museums resulted in the decision to maintain the use of docents to interpret the twenty-first-century museum with a semiguided tour. The script temporarily toyed with three scenarios, one for a single-docent tour, another where docents offered transitions between spaces only, and a final option for unaccompanied visitors. However, the interpretive team privileged a single-docent tour for consistency, and so that tours could be constructed based on visitor interest ascertained in the walk from the gift shop.⁷⁰ For the semiguided tour, the docent introduced spaces and key themes to visitors in each room, let them explore, and remained available for conversation or questions. Ultimately this Page 77 →style worked well, but it posed a unique set of problems because of ingrained tour etiquette for visitors, tour size, and docent availability. These problems left some docents wondering whether a self-guided tour should be offered.

At the beginning of the tour, MoRE docents explained and modeled the house’s signature semiguided tour, a new tour experience where panels and interactives were coupled with a few well-chosen artifacts. Many in the HHM business remain committed to outdated tour design and structure despite data that suggests traditional tours are no longer the preferred form.⁷¹ The semiguided tour injected guests spatially and temporally into the Wilson family’s world “as the capital was rebuilt” and the city’s Black residents “attempted to negotiate the difficult terrain of citizenship and free labor.” Then docents let visitors wander.⁷² The tour script and the MoRE docents’ practice of encouraging guests to move ahead or linger behind violated the traditional norms of visitor etiquette by having them disengage from the docent and engage with the exhibit individually.⁷³ The experimental model replaced what Vagnone and Ryan call the “traditional passive operation model” of guided tours that offer guests a chance to peek inside “rooms in frozen tableaus” but bar entry or close inspection. The free movement of the MoRE tour created a “decentralized experience” that provided a variety of activities and means with which visitors could determine meaning for themselves.⁷⁴ Guests could inspect panels and artifacts, watch videos, explore an interactive map and family tree, dress up at a clothing station, and hold laminated art and recipes. An example of personalized meaning making was using the primary artifact of the house to allow guests to think about the Wilsons as first-time homeowners. The interpretive team felt this was a milestone for many modern-day Americans. Docents easily demonstrated the home as a showplace for the family by speaking to the preservation and how it expressed the family’s growing socioeconomic status.⁷⁵ By connecting with visitors’ experience of buying their first home, their aspiration to do so, or inequalities that prevent them from doing so, the MoRE engaged in poetic preservation, creating a moment where authentic, engaging stories of the house’s past united with feelings visitors might have about their own lives.⁷⁶

For each room of the home, the tour script required transition, room, and engagement statements that centered the Wilsons and Reconstruction and prompted visitors to explore. The engagement statement provided space for docents to pull back, a key component of the semiguided tour. Docents typically talk nonstop for thirty minutes to an hour on traditional HHM tours. To pull back, refrain from speaking, and let visitors explore was a skill that had to be developed and improved upon by all those conducting tours. Chapter 3 probes further into the pull-back technique and its challenges for the docent during training at the MoRE.

Page 78 →One of the most effective pull-back tools developed naturally in the formal parlor. Docents pushed play on a sound artifact, an early twentieth-century rendition of a song performed in Columbia during Reconstruction titled “Kathleen Mavourneen.” Playing it created interpretive mood music, giving guests permission to delve deeper into the map or move toward panels and artifacts. The music generated space for the docent to step aside, wait for questions, or engage visitors one-on-one. This musical maneuver incorporated consultant Daniella Cook’s suggestion that docents give verbal cues encouraging visitors to explore on their own.⁷⁷ Several other docents found this technique successful in encouraging self-exploration. Storm’s visitors got a kick out of listening to the music after she joked, “Well, if you were partying at the time, then you would have listened to this music.” Gunter wished there was more music.⁷⁸ The song not only encouraged visitors to play and explore, but it also aurally demonstrated music of the sort that most HHM docents only describe. The role of sound in shaping the cognitive and emotional experiences of museum visitors is less studied by public history scholars than it should be given the rise in multimedia exhibits, but sound can be used to reinforce an exhibit’s message as well as affecting visitor mood, pace, and memory recall. Researchers conducted a study in 2010–11 of two types of music incorporated into an interpretive space at the Laiho Memorial Museum, which honors Lai Ho, a pioneering author of modern Taiwanese literature. They discovered that period music, even with lyrics that threatened to overload visitors with information, was more effective than light instrumental music from the modern era akin to that played in consumer spaces. Similar to consumers, most visitors found the light music relaxed them or made them comfortable, slowed their pace, and deepened their desire to explore the exhibit. But some of them thought the music should be from the historical era or promote the exhibit themes, if not actual music Lai Ho enjoyed or sounds he would have heard during his life. Even when they did not understand the lyrics (and some wanted the lyrics displayed for meaning), visitors that heard a contemporary piece of music from Lai Ho’s generation felt like they were “stepping back in time” or felt nostalgia or connection to the era. The primary issue was listener fatigue generated from hearing the song repeatedly during an extended stay in the space. Thus the use of “Kathleen Mavourneen” produced results similar to both styles of music studied in the Lai Ho museum. Visitors received encouragement to explore via the historical ambiance of the music but had to physically push the button again to hear the song repeated.⁷⁹

Playing “Kathleen Mavourneen” clearly orchestrated the new behavior docents were attempting to teach visitors about self-engagement, reflection, and exploration; but inventive options like this were not always available in Page 79 →every space. The rooms that most naturally sparked exploration were early stops on the tour: the spacious formal parlor with its map, the study’s original Wilson artifacts, and the architecture of the butler’s pantry.⁸⁰ Previous museum experiences taught conformity, an “unwritten and unquestioned code of conduct” in HHMs, which rendered some visitors immobile. The semiguided tour worked, but some guests could not abandon their docent for fear of violating preconceived notions of visitor etiquette: Do not move. Do not speak. Do not touch.⁸¹ Numerous docents spoke of visitors that followed them, as one docent said, “like a puppy.” To counter this, docents remained in a space rather than moving on to the next one to wait because otherwise visitors tended to follow them. Permission to explore mattered little to visitors once the docent exited a room. Storm confessed, “I would like them [visitors] to have more independence and to feel that they can walk around and look at things.” But she ascribed this dependence to the traditional form of HHMs, noting, “They’re almost always worried they’re going to be left behind.”⁸²

Visitor response to the semiguided tour varied.⁸³ Size mattered significantly in determining if groups even split up at all. A small group of two or comprising a single family generally stuck close to the docents. But the pull-back worked well with larger groups, often made up of several different smaller groups.⁸⁴ With big groups, however, came “herding.” Docents were reluctant to interrupt visitors engaged with the exhibit. One docent waited for questions in the doorway to the next room, hoping to draw visitors eventually to that area. Because the docent never had a group larger than ten and knew there was little time to backtrack, they tried to wait until everyone was ready to enter the next space.⁸⁵ Hogan took her cues from visitors. If a visitor moved quickly into the next space, she offered supplemental material not part of her regular transition statements. When half of the group moved into the next space, she would follow and deliver the transition. She repeated it quietly to those small groups that trickled in afterward. Her most difficult problem was when this technique didn’t work because large groups of people with varying levels of interest finished rooms at different times. It could be a “real mess” when she wanted to show the informal parlor’s exhibit film and move the group upstairs together.⁸⁶ Gunter’s biggest tour included twenty-six visitors, half of whom disappeared regularly. The only effective way to draw most of them back together was resuming the narrative. It also proved challenging to move them through the house in ninety minutes, much less in seventy-five minutes, the standard length of the tour.⁸⁷

The problem of steering exceptionally large groups through the semi-guided tour illuminated other issues that arose giving this style of tour. Streakers are visitors who move fast through a museum or exhibit with only Page 80 →a few stops, while studiers spend more time looking at individual elements or the exhibit as a whole.⁸⁸ Both kinds toured the MoRE regularly.⁸⁹ Generally the semiguided tour provided just enough pace control for those who needed structure and enough space for those who liked to move at their own speed.⁹⁰ However, sometimes visitors moved so quickly that one docent could not catch them. Volunteer Pris Stickney sometimes left the main group to give the quicker visitors information, but her personal philosophy was that the people pacing themselves deserved docent accompaniment. Few groups split long enough to force her to make this decision, however. Other docents expressed the challenge posed by big groups that included both streakers and studiers. Accordingly one docent felt she and the tour were not equipped to handle larger groups.⁹¹

The freedom of the semiguided tour allowed visitors with varied learning styles to craft their own experience with the images, panels, and interactives. The panels appealed to the portion of people who preferred reading over interactives. The images and illustrations provided fodder for nonverbal learners.⁹² Some visitors simply wanted the guide to talk. Others did not want to be coerced into participating. Gunter understood this sentiment, as she rarely enjoys guided tours. She preferred drawing her own conclusions, choosing her movements, and avoiding interaction. Then she contemplated her experience further after leaving a site.⁹³ Holmes worried the engagement model might make visitors feel forced to answer “led-by-the-nose discussion questions” that made her own college students “miserable.”⁹⁴ Their distaste for participation was not unique, according to museum visitor participation expert Nina Simon.⁹⁵ When these learning styles collide, they can cause headaches for the docent and visitors. Volunteer docent Maria Schneider gave one tour where other guests grew frustrated with a gentleman’s extensive interest in the home. She pulled him aside and let him know he could come back through and ask questions after the group tour. It was unclear whether he dominated her narrative by asking questions, rendering the pullback ineffective, or if she was not instructing him to linger and continuing with her tour.⁹⁶

Nonetheless, an advantage of the semiguided tour and the lingering docent was the one-on-one engagement opportunity. Some visitors approached Storm individually during the pull-back, more willing to speak to her than to a whole group of strangers. She learned from her guests during these engagement points as she imparted her own wisdom. Her actions generated decentralized, often individualized, conversations throughout the tour between docent and guest, as idealized by HHM reformers. Often guests who want to participate in a dialogue receive a monologue instead.⁹⁷ Stickney found she could “really interact with people” at the MoRE to a greater extent than Page 81 →the other houses Historic Columbia administered. This once culminated in a two-hour tour. The semiguided structure facilitated more discussion and created a relaxed atmosphere where she did not have to talk the entire time and her audience did not expect her to on many of her tours.⁹⁸

A self-guided tour was not an option for visitors. Of 645 visitors who answered an evaluation question about whether they preferred the self-guided portions of the tour, such as rooms 4 and 5, only 51 people, or just under 8 percent, responded affirmatively. In late March 2015, the interpretive team added a survey question asking visitors if they wanted the tour to be self-guided. In the first month of responses, 32 people, or just over 91 percent of respondents, replied no.⁹⁹ But Historic Columbia’s most consistent and largest conundrum was staffing the home, which made the self-guided tour appealing. Historic Columbia suffers from the larger issue in HHMs of volunteer recruitment declining along with attendance.¹⁰⁰ The organization relied on volunteer staff during the week and a paid, part-time weekend staff with docents that work a couple days a month. Staffing was an immediate concern because of the impending increase in spring visitation when attendance comes out of its winter lull, the heavier flow of guests expected on weekends, and the fact that tours for four HHMs left at the top of each hour.¹⁰¹ Furthermore, of the volunteer docents who participated in the first round of training, few completed the process. Docents approved to conduct tours trickled through the training pipeline but not quickly enough to fill the schedule.¹⁰² In the early months, staff filled numerous gaps in the weekday schedule, which ran Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Three of those days, I, as tour facilitator, conducted half of the six tours offered a day. Every day of the first full month that the site was open, there was at least one unfilled tour time.¹⁰³ On numerous days of the week, only one MoRE docent was available when two shifts were needed. Compounding this issue was the fact that docents typically worked three-hour shifts, only allowing coverage for two seventy-five-minute tours. As a result, staff filled in for the last tour of the day and frequently the first tour of the day.¹⁰⁴ Historic Columbia took measures to manage the homes more efficiently and ease the fatigue docents experienced after giving a tour that is both intellectually complicated and energetic and lasting more than an hour. The retirement of volunteer coordinator and frequent fallback docent Ann Posner resulted in more scheduling gaps as her replacement, Betsy Kleinfelder, underwent training. In the spring of 2015, Historic Columbia changed its tour times for all of its HHMs, staggering and offering tours of two houses every hour.¹⁰⁵

The tour time changes relieved pressure, but MoRE docent fatigue remained a problem. Given the limited number of docents trained to conduct MoRE tours and the detailed exhibit itself, Doe thought the self-guided tour Page 82 →seemed a reasonable solution. Doe and Gunter supported a self-guided option, understanding there are pros and cons to both styles.¹⁰⁶ Gunter thought self-guided tours could spark an increase in visitation and allow visitors to take in information missed on the guided tour. The drawback was that some people need to be directed to specific information. For example, in the formal parlor, Gunter tried to make sure people read the demographics panel to comprehend how integrated the legislature was. Then she could demonstrate with the other panels the intelligence and power wielded by legislators, which was “part of what we whitewashed in the history.”¹⁰⁷ The self-guided option also gave guests flexibility with time. They could take two hours or twenty minutes.¹⁰⁸

Gunter’s example illustrates that the written text of the exhibit more than any other factor worried docents about the self-guided tour. Bacon-Rogers too felt that the panel materials needed docents to make stronger connections. Such materials included mounted artifacts like the tissue ballot used to rig the 1876 election and information about Wilson’s relationship with Thomas Dixon, his former college acquaintance who authored The Clansman and asked the president to watch D. W. Griffith’s screen adaptation, The Birth of a Nation. However, docents were essential for other reasons. There was no one to pose a subject or question for exploration and no labels for the digital interactives and the stereoscopes to instruct visitors on use.¹⁰⁹ Docents answered questions that the panels sparked or did not address, which volunteer docent Doe almost always encountered on tours. In addition, the panels were too numerous. Their text extended beyond what could be consumed in a one-to-two-hour period. Furthermore, panels contained too much information, a common problem with exhibits codeveloped with historian consultants, who tend to write for their academic peers. Docents confirmed that panels, while well done, were excessive, containing more than they could cover.¹¹⁰ On the opposite end of that spectrum, rhetorical questions on the panels written at a more remedial level confused some of Bacon-Rogers’s visitors, who have asked her whether the questions were for school groups. While the self-guided tour had its merits in extending reading time, she could not envision a tour that was completely docent free. The language also prevented tours from being completely self-guided. She warned that the panels’ advanced text played into the stereotype that museums are elite, white spaces and an “intellectual bore.”¹¹¹ Lee understood that part of her purpose as a weekend docent was to accommodate people who are reluctant to read and aid visitors who did not yet know what a “museum of Reconstruction” was. Historic Columbia wanted “everyone to get at least something out of it,” which may mean the docent giving some information in each room. Lee received some complaints from fellow public historians Page 83 →who did not want to be led around but also conceded they were specialists, or what visitor expert John Falk identified as the professional/hobbyists. These visitors will get something from a self-guided experience. Otherwise, both Lee and volunteer Westcott remained unconvinced how much a visitor would take away from the museum unaccompanied.¹¹²

The consensus from docents and visitor evaluation data was that docents remained essential to the experience. For Bacon-Rogers the guides were “the most valuable part of that house.” Even a supporter of self-guided tours admitted that the docent dramatically increased the quality of the tour.¹¹³ Data confirmed that nearly 46 percent of 556 evaluated visitors that were asked what information they found most interesting overwhelmingly selected what the tour guide had told them. The panels came in second at just over 23 percent, making docents critical to the visitor experience and the exhibit.¹¹⁴ Only three visitors mentioned the panels specifically. One thought they were well done, and another thought there were too many. Two found the panels informative, but one of those wanted more time to read.¹¹⁵ Docents stationed in the home may be a better solution than the self-guided tour, according to three docents. This approach would allow visitors to get their questions answered and offer docent engagement points. On “Dollar Sundays,” Historic Columbia offered local residents one-dollar tours of one of its four houses each third Sunday of the month. Two docents who were stationed in the home for that event found the method effective. Bernadette Scott witnessed “people reading signage at their own pace and in so thoughtful a manner.”¹¹⁶ For stationing to work ideally, Bacon-Rogers argued, two or three docents would be positioned downstairs and upstairs at all times. This would accommodate those who were interested only in the house itself and some brief information as well as those who wanted extended time. She too had experienced visitors on Dollar Sundays spending two and half hours reading everything.¹¹⁷ As of May 2023, the MoRE was the most popular house on these reduced-priced Sundays.¹¹⁸

The intellectual and emotional difficulty of challenging preconceived myths of Reconstruction and discussing white domestic terror, the text-panel-heavy exhibit that some docents and visitors found overwhelming, and the long tradition of docent-guided and-centered tours in HHMs dictated the need for a new docent experience at the MoRE. Its docents proved vital in presenting a provocative Reconstruction interpretation to HHM audiences. MoRE docents wove a small number of objects into a powerful narrative where visitors made meaningful connections with authentic objects related to the family and the time period of Reconstruction. Docents incorporated objects as they saw fit and spent more time in spaces where social objects generated more engagement. After seeing visitors embrace an Page 84 →unconventional house tour and express genuine interest in learning about the relatively little-known subject of Reconstruction, several docents came to favor museum interpretations that moved away from objects and were driven by thematic substance. Both docents and guests of the MoRE were in the midst of an HHM revolution, changing the way they thought about a century-old philosophy of ordering an abundance of nonessential objects into period rooms to tell the story of elite lives. While Historic Columbia successfully implemented a semiguided tour with a pull-back technique that facilitated visitor exploration and one-on-one engagement, there were drawbacks to this style of interpretation. It produced problems with tour management, particularly large groups, and there were only a handful of docents certified to conduct the tour. Some docents came to think that a self-guided or stationed tour should be offered. The semiguided tour was rewarding but experimental. And it would require special training on the topics of Wilson, Reconstruction, and inclusivity. The next chapter traces the development and implementation of the new docent training process for the MoRE, a best practice that helped docents and visitors unlearn state-sanctioned Lost Cause indoctrination and a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction.